Hello www-tag,
Rick Jellife wrote (and I missed it, due to a mail delivery problem)
> Am I right in thinking that all members of the TAG are now residents
> of North America?
No, you are not right. I live in France and Stuart lives in the UK;
Roy sometimes lives in Switzerland. What brought you to such a
conclusion?
> If so, does the TAG feel that this may compromise their ability or
> credability to architect a "World Wide" Web to some degree?
I can understand your concern, had you been right, and also for other
reasons.
> Or, as a
> lesser question, does theTAG feel they are actively encouraging and
> perpetuating a centre-periphery divide between dominant regions and
> dominated regions?
For my part I do feel that I am actively encouraging consideration of
I18N as an integral part of the architecture.
For example, I have been an attendee and (mostly) presenter at the
bi-annual Unicode conferences since the 10th conference (the latest is
the 23rd conference, in Prague) and am also on the conference review
committee. I have also taken pains to ensure that SVG is adequately
internationalized, even in the smallest profile, and have consistently
argued for inclusion of international examples in tests throughout the
SVG test suite, not isolated off into some 'international tests'
ghetto.
I bring the same focus on international access to the Web to the TAG
as I have in previous projects. For example, I have been active in the
IRI issue.
> A simple measure might be to reserve one of the voted positions for
> candidates who are different from the other candidates. (For
> example, there could be a list drawn up: if all TAG members are
> anglo, native-English-speaking, able-bodied men resident in North
> America and brought up in a Christian (or post-Christian) culture,
> and educated at a Western university, and working for an
> organization headquarteredin North America, that one board position
> should be restricted to people who differ in at least three of these
> qualitities.)
I consider such 'positive discrimination to give no guarantee of an
internationalized outlook and to be simplistic and naive. It relies on
stereotypes. It also assumes that the culture around the TAG
participants (the people they interact with) is equally narrow and
stereotypically homogenous.
So, briefly, I take ion board your concern that internationalization
be adequately represented in the architecture and reject your proposed
means of achieving it.
If you have specific, technical, architectural concerns related to
internationalization in the architecture than I invite you to air
them.
--
Chris mailto:chris@w3.org